Personal Info on Natalie Portman

Born:
June 9th 1981

Location:
Born in Jerusalem, Israel. She now lives in New York.

Early Works:
She played Anne in "Anne of Green Gables" in 1994 and "Tapestry" in 1995. She was discovered in a local Pizza parlour (You know, I eat Pizza all the time, why haven't I been "discovered"?)

Her Family:
Her mother is an artist, and her father is a doctor. She is an only child.

Her Dislikes:
Meat, Natalie is a vegetarian.doesn't even eat fish of dairy products

"I think school is so much harder than real life. People are so much more accepting when they are adults."

"Danny [Aiello] told me: Don't do television"

"Cute is when a person's personality shines through their looks. Like in the way they walk, every time you see them you just want to run up and hug them."

Michael Mann on Natalie Portman: "When I met her, you could tell she was kind of a prodigy".

[Harpers and Queen Magazine] :

"This school-room cutie has more acting ability in her little toe than Demi Moore and Jennifer Aniston combined."

 From CNN.Com

Natalie Portman hits the books

Natalie Portman

November 10, 1999
Web posted at: 11:50 a.m. EST (1650 GMT)

NEW YORK (AP) -- Natalie Portman is going to hate herself in the morning.

Hate herself because there are dirty jeans and unread books piling up in her dorm room. Hate herself because she is here, hundreds of miles away, curled up on a sofa answering questions.

"It's so overwhelming. I have to go home after this and just cry over how much work I have," says the 18-year-old college freshman, her eyes rolling heavenward.

"I'm having the most amazing, amazing, amazing time. But it's really hard: balancing everything, taking care of yourself, setting your own limits, scheduling for yourself," she says.

"And, on top of that, you have to balance doing, like, your housework, too -- which was never a part of the equation! All of a sudden, you have to do laundry and clean your sheets and vacuum and wash the toilets."

Trying to be true to herself
That's an image: Natalie Portman, the star of the summer's biggest smash hit and one of Hollywood's most sought-after young actresses, getting busy with a bathroom scrubber.

PORTMAN'S
PORTFOLIO:
"Anywhere But Here," 1999. A free-spirit mother and serious daughter come to terms as the daughter heads off to college.

"Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace," 1999. Queen Amidala and young Anakin Skywalker meet for the first time.

"Mars Attacks!", 1996. As Taffy Dale, the president's daughter, Portman's one of the few people left standing after Martians try to take over Earth.

"Beautiful Girls," 1996. Portman had a supporting role in this movie about a traveling piano player come home.

"Everyone Says I Love You," 1996. Woody Allen's musical film about a family of rich, liberal Upper East Siders.

"Heat," 1995. The cop thriller directed by Michael Mann ("The Insider," 1999).

Short film: "Developing," 1995.

"Léon," 1994. In this Luc Besson film, Portman's character learns to be a professional assassin from the man who killed her parents.



And why not? After all, that, too, is Portman, a teen-ager who rises to announce she needs "a potty break" or who preemptively apologizes for her "stinky feet" upon shedding her Guccis.

"I'm just trying to be true to who I am and not let anyone define me except for myself," she says. "I'm not trying to have a magazine call me the 'It Girl."'

Perhaps "Lit Girl" would be better. Portman may have ruled a planet in the "Star Wars" prequel, but now she just wants to be one more stressed-out frosh lugging books across the quad.

"I've been so lucky to have these opportunities, but we have a way of making movie stars not mortal. We have a way of making them images rather than people, and they're human beings," she says.

"They're extraordinary at what they do, but so is my father who is a doctor, and no one ever freaked out about meeting him. No one would ever shake shaking his hand, but people meet me and they'll shake and they'll cry and that's weird -- and that's wrong."

College pals not fazed by fame
Keeping Portman sane are her new college pals: the youngest speaker at the Million Man March; a cellist who has worked with Yo-Yo Ma; the poet-slash-artist down the hall; her roommate, a star tennis player.

"You should hear these kids!" she says. "I mean, these people are just all so fantastic in their own right that, you know, nothing I do is that impressive to them that they'd be overly interested in me."

Portman is as cagey as she is self-deprecating. She's an on-the-record vegetarian, a straight-A student, a teetotaler and an adamant nonsmoker. Drugs? Don't even think about it.

Portman as Queen Amidala in "Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace"
"I don't like it when people just assume they can smoke around me or do drugs around me," she says. "I think probably people view me as a goody-goody, which isn't necessarily true. I mean, I'm a human being. I'm not an angel."

There are areas, though, that Portman feels uncomfortable discussing. She shies away from referring to her hometown on New York's Long Island, and the gossipy details of her life at Harvard University aren't easily forthcoming. She's even registered under a different name at school.

"There's a great mystery to Natalie," says director Wayne Wang. "We're very close on one level, but also there's a great mystery about her. I think it's a certain kind of control that she has, a certain maturity."

Portman just laughs it off. The secrecy, she says, gives her insulation, while the pseudonym -- borrowed from her maternal grandmother -- offers a degree of anonymity when she's not acting.

"I'm not trying to hide," Portman insists. "I'm not trying to have a split life here. In no way am I trying to be two different people. I'm not Superman -- I'm the same person. I don't act differently when I'm in my different worlds."

Portman in "Anywhere But Here"
Movie helped with college transition
Her worlds intertwined last year while making her new movie, "Anywhere But Here," in which Portman stars as a teen-ager mature beyond her years whose mother (Susan Sarandon) is flighty and needy.

Yearning for adulthood and freedom, Portman's character goes through a painful coming of age while also coming to terms with her mother and finally escaping -- to college.

In other words, life imitated art.

"It was interesting because it was like experiencing something exactly the same way that I knew I was going to experience a year later," she says. "Moving out is a big deal -- it's a huge change in your life -- so thinking about it a little earlier was helpful."

Portman is a delicate beauty with eyebrows that skate horizontally across her face and almond-shaped eyes that hint at her Israeli heritage. Two tiny moles stand sentry above either cheek.

Her striking looks led to her big break. Like an updated version of the Lana Turner-found-in-a-drugstore fable, Portman was discovered while munching pizza at a Long Island eatery.

"One day after dance class, I was in this pizza parlor and this guy just happened to be there because he lived in the neighborhood," she said. "He worked at Revlon, and he asked me if I was interested in modeling."

Nah. Natalie had other plans.

"I kept my cool," she recalls. "I told him that I wanted to act."

And so she did: After her debut in "The Professional," Portman got roles in "Heat," "Everyone Says I Love You," "Beautiful Girls" and "Mars Attacks!" She also starred on Broadway in "The Diary of Anne Frank."

Oh, and she never took an acting class.

"Sometimes when you kind of let things happen, it just works out," she says. "That's why it's kind of fascinating to me that I've succeeded. I think it's maybe why I've succeeded.

"Nobody likes someone who's pushy and whose world is going to be broken if they don't make it, you know? I think it's kind of comforting to people to see that I have a complete life outside of acting."

Then the undercover movie star leans in for a confession.

"I didn't have this undying need to be an actress. I didn't have that fire within me ever -- at any point. And still, I don't think I have that within me," she says.

"I don't really know if acting would have ultimately become my passion as an adult, or if there's something else I would have found had I not been in the pizza shop. That's what college is helping me investigate."